WHAT MEMORY SHALL WE CREATE TOGETHER?

    Generations of Americans have served their Country in war, and built it in peacetime and during the long Cold War into a Nation State of incomparable power and wealth.    We are five percent of the people on Earth and we own sixty percent of global wealth.   Some call us a mega-state.   We moved from the Industrial Age to the Service Economy and now to the Information Management Society, compressing centuries of change into less than five decades.   We have created a Nation State on a colossal scale.    Those who died for us would acknowledge this.

    But is this what they died for?

    We understand that, in no small way, this Colossus lives because of the synergy between the freedoms of inquiry, expression, association, travel, commerce, innovation and investment, and an abundance of human and material resources.   The memory of our tangible accomplishments – marvelous as they are -- are an inadequate tribute to the fallen.

    Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and its Bill of Rights were not crafted as a business model.   All our officers – commissioned and noncommissioned, civil service and foreign service, federal, state, and commonwealth – take an oath to a piece of paper.   They stand in an unending line of Americans who have pledged their fortunes, their lives, and their sacred honor, to the handwritten words that enshrine freedom as the essence of living as a human being.   Live free or die.

    The great energies that we exert in business and commerce are child’s play compared to the energies of mind, integrity, compassion, judgment, commitment to the service of others, and the deep desire to be one Nation, that undergird the adult process we call democracy.   This relentlessly demanding process requires a commitment by each of us to the everyday, ordinary freedom of all our fellow Americans, especially for those who disagree with us, particularly over matters of conscience.

    In battle, the enemies of freedom are terribly real and immediate.  On September 11^th, 2001, we endured the first strike of a war that may exceed the forty year duration of the Cold War.   Nonetheless, in this place, on this day, the enemies of freedom seem far away.

    At the time of the last Presidential Election, our Nation divided between Red States and Blue States.   Love for America faded into Red or Blue.  None of the fallen died for the freedom of the people in the Red States or for the freedom of the people in the Blue States.  We believe that each man and woman who died for our country, died for America.   Not for a part of America or a group in America or a political party or an ideology.   All our tributes today rest on the premise that they died for one Nation.

    We come then to today, to this Memorial Day, when we honor those whose ultimate act of service – the giving of their lives for ours -- we believe is sacred.   We say they made the ultimate sacrifice.

    The word, sacrifice, means to make something holy.  In the Book of Genesis, to make something holy, something of great value was transformed into something useful only to the Lord.   A first-born lamb was destroyed and transformed into smoke.

    Our understanding of being a Nation expanded the meaning of sacrifice beyond ancient religious tradition.  When they made the ultimate sacrifice, each new born generation did so not only to witness to their deepest personal values, but also to ensure that we could continue to live in freedom.   The memory of this most precious gift transforms the meaning of all our lives.

    Memory enables us to compress time.   We can imagine the doughboys of World War I, the GIs of World War II and the Korean Conflict, the grunts of Vietnam, and more recently the men and women in combat in the Middle East.   All of them are captured in our imagination at once, some faded by a century and some as vivid as yesterday.  They stand, transformed from the hell of war to the fields of eternal peace, and they look upon us in this place as we remember them.

    Look back at them now through the eye of your imagination and the vision of your heart.  They have given us the most moving images in our memories.   We have seen their aircraft fall from the skies; their ships sink in the oceans; and their bodies fall in combat.  Tell them we are a free people because of their sacrifice.

    We have been here with our brothers and sisters on Memorial Day in other years.   Their silent questions to each of us remain unchanged:  Does the Flag still wave?   Is America still “one Nation under God”?   Do you cherish our Constitution and the Bill of Rights?  Do you cherish them not only for yourself but also for others?  Are you a Nation of laws or a Nation governed by the whim of the privileged?   Are you still willing to bear the great burdens of being free?

    Look at them and ask yourself whether we are the mirror image of their indivisible love for America.  What memories have we created to honor them?   For their sacrifices, what would we have them remember about us?

    We have been here before, and once again we face a world filled with forces and powers that would destroy and enslave us.   It is hard to imagine now that the challenges to our Nation were ever as great.   We feel the danger.   We sense it.   We can taste it.

    The danger out there, as pernicious and evil as it is, is insignificant in comparison to the danger within us.     Fractured into a hundred competing interests, our Nation is not unified by a commonly shared vision of America.  Before the Revolution, we were fractious and we have always been so.  We have been here many times in our history; together we have found our way.   Together, we must do so again.

    Our sisters and brothers in our mind’s eye know that an outside force can never defeat a free people.   That is no less true today than it was at Valley Forge or Bunker Hill or Pearl Harbor.   The enlistment of all Americans in a common cause ensures victory.   United, one Nation under God.

    We came here to join with Memorial Day tributes across our land and wherever Americans gather.   On this Memorial Day, this particular Day, in this year, let us renew our ownership of the legacy of freedom. Give an accounting of yourself in the long and unceasing struggle to preserve freedom.

    What memory shall we create together to honor those we remember today?

Copyright 2004.  James C. Moore
Reproduced with permission.

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